On January 2, 2023, Claudine Gay resigned as President of Harvard University following dissatisfaction with her testimony at a Congressional hearing and many allegations of plagiarism, including in her doctoral dissertation.
Harvard sought to minimize the plagiarism allegations, using words such as “missteps” and called it,“examples of duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” but the apparent failure to correctly cite, according to Harvard, “did not constitute research misconduct.” Gay submitted corrections to her dissertation and two academic papers. She later faced more alleged examples of plagiarism.
Harvard even tried to threaten reporters from the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit if the paper printed the allegations. However, the Harvard Crimson printed specific side by side examples of how President Gay misappropriated the work of others without proper credit, and those examples covered not only Gay’s dissertation but also many of her peer-reviewed research papers.
With so many examples, Gay’s pattern of plagiarism could not be dismissed as a one-time mistake or as a racially motivated attack.
To be a successful university president, natural leadership skills and a solid record as a scholar are both required. Gay and Harvard recognized this and decided to part ways. Yet, the questions of whether Gay’s doctoral degree from Harvard was properly awarded or whether her conduct should justify removing her faculty tenure remain unresolved.
With Gay’s resignation, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has turned his attention to seeking the resignation of Harvard Corporation members who tried to cover up the plagiarism, and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce continues its investigation by demanding documents from the corporation’s inquiry into Gay’s plagiarism.
Deane Malott’s inaugural address
On September 19, 1951, Deane Waldo Malott, the Chancellor of the University of Kansas, was inaugurated as the sixth president of Cornell. His address was later found to have major passages copied from a 1949 speech by Harold Taylor, the President of Sarah Lawrence College.
The November 10, 1951 issue of the New Yorker magazine printed an article entitled “Funny Coincidence” that showed the passages from both the Malott and Taylor speeches side-by-side.
The Sun repeatedly asked Malott and Cornell for comment, but the response was “no comment.” By the time the Sun printed the story on November 30, it had already been covered by the Topeka State Journal and the University of Kansas student paper, the Daily Kansan.
When Malott finally commented, he said he copied the text from a pamphlet and failed to credit the original author because he did not know whom to credit. Cornell took no action against its new president.
Kevin Kruse’s doctoral dissertation
Princeton History Professor Kevin Kruse finished his Cornell doctoral dissertation in 2000. Another historian, Phillip W. Magness, accused him in 2022 of both plagiarizing in his dissertation and a 2015 monograph published by Basic Books entitled, “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.” Magness asked both Princeton and Cornell to investigate.
On August 9, 2022, Cornell’s Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education Kathryn J. Boor wrote to Kruse and found that Kruse’s dissertation “copied” 66 words in passages from Georgia Institute of Technology Professor Emeritus Ronald H. Bayor’s 1996 book “Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta.” Kruse also copied a 51 word passage from “The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit” (1996), a book written by Thomas Sugrue, a New York University historian.
Boor concluded that “these citation errors were made without intent to plagiarize from these scholars’ works.” She noted that they were corrected in 2005 when his dissertation was published by Princeton University Press. Cornell took no action against Kruse.
Princeton also completed an internal investigation and found copying in both the dissertation and the monograph but found that Kruse’s actions “did not constitute a violation of the research misconduct policy.” Magness claimed that there were other instances of plagiarism by Kruse, including copying from historian Rick Perlstein’s book “Nixonland.” According to the Daily Princetonian, no actions were taken against Kruse.
Political tool or endemic disease for academics?
The rules that govern students at Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell prohibit and punish both intentional and unintended copying. Although Gay and Kruse were students when they wrote their dissertations, apparently Harvard and Cornell apply a different standard to dissertations after their authors rise in academia.
Although plagiarism strikes at the heart of academia’s truth-seeking function and is a very serious charge against any faculty member, institutional efforts to cover up or minimize specific cases appear to be more widespread than just the Claudine Gay case.
Faculty plagiarism has moved into the focus of national attention. Business Insider has found that Bill Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, a former tenured MIT professor, copied at least four passages in her 2010 MIT dissertation, and Oxman has apologized. Reportedly, Oxman left MIT in June 2021. In response, on January 5, Ackman promised to fund a plagiarism review of all current MIT professors.
